First post, by snorg
If you were designing the "perfect pc" what would you want it to have?
Maybe I'm showing my age, or maybe I'm just jaded, but computers aren't interesting to me in the same way these days.
I'm trying to think of what a good PC to get someone interested in computing would consist of, and not just as a consumption device. Something that would allow you to dip your feet in programming or take a deeper dive, as it were.
I'm not sure what a good baseline would be, maybe something like an AMD A8 or A10 APU, 4gb RAM, 500GB HD, DVD-RW for hardware. Maybe something like GPIO on the R-Pi or the Geekport on the BeBox for hardware hacking. Some sort of scripting language or dev environment for software.
Maybe computers as a creative tool are a dying thing? Several years ago I gave a cousin an Athlon with a Radeon AIW, a bunch of software and got sort of a "meh" reaction. Maybe he already had fancier stuff at home, I don't know.
Maybe people just want tablets and smartphones? I was never really an uber-nerd growing up, but I think I had way more curiousity about how the machine actually worked than kids today. Ok, I'm going to go get back on my lawn now.